Tuesday, May 23, 2017

His Body was not left behind

Ascension of the
Lord 2017

Every Christmas
Day, we hear the words: “The Word became flesh.”Sadly, I think that these words often 'go in
through one ear and out the other' and this happens for two reasons. The first
is precisely because we hear them so often, it has become an empty formula
commended to memory through rote repetition. The second is that those words are
so profound, our brain generally shuts down when it is incapable of unpacking
what it is attempting to comprehend. As our faith tries to grasp their meaning,
their depth overwhelms our understanding. But for us to fully grasp the meaning
of the Ascension of the Lord, we must first try to comprehend exactly what took
place at Christmas.

Has Christ’s
Ascension come to mean that Christ is now in a disembodied state? Has the event
of the Ascension finally allowed Christ to shed His flesh so that He may return
to His invisible pre-Incarnation spiritual state?His Ascension seems to have established a
further level of invisibility so as to remove Him completely from our
terrestrial realm into a heavenly cloud that takes Him “out of sight.” But the
Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that the Ascension of the Lord refers
to “the entry of Jesus’ humanity into Divine Glory in God’s heavenly domain,
forty days after Easter.” What does the Church mean when we speak of Jesus’
“humanity” or of His “human nature”?

By humanity, we
mean the human body and soul that the Son of God united to His Nature as God,
at the moment He took flesh in the womb of the Holy Virgin Mary, and it is this
“human nature” that was exalted at Jesus’ Ascension into glory. In other words,
the Ascension did not mean the dissolution of the Incarnation.The Word became flesh, and in that
flesh, He was crucified, died, rose again and now ascended to heaven. Christ
did not shed His humanity nor His body in this returning act to God.

The fact that
Jesus ascended bodily into heaven may seem strange to modern sensibilities.
What more, to believers of other religions? Many religions reject the physical
aspect of the human existence in some way. Many view the physical as something
bad that needs to be overcome. Hinduism, for example, teaches that the physical
world is all an illusion. Attachment to the physical and material world would
lead one to eternal rebirth or reincarnation.But if you let go or detach yourself, then you will become pure spirit
and achieve perfect oneness with god in a state called “nirvana.” In both Islam
and Judaism, believers are taught that God would never exist within flesh.For God to exist in a body- that would be
stooping too low.

If Jesus possesses
glory as God, why would He need to bring His human nature or His body to
heaven? Why does His human nature need to be glorified? This actually
highlights the very significance and importance of the Ascension. It is at the
Ascension that Jesus’ human nature – His Body and His Soul – are exalted.
And because His physical body was exalted and glorified, He can now pass
that exultation and glory on to those who become “members of His Body,” the
Church, through being united to Him by the Holy Spirit in Baptism! The
Ascension expands the Incarnation to make it inclusive. So, by being exalted in
His human nature, Jesus makes it possible for all of us who are baptised to be
exalted and to share in His exalted glory. Human nature has been exalted
in Jesus! This feat of redemption was greater than God’s original act of
creation. “God became man, in order that men may become gods.”

The Lord’s Ascension
into heaven accomplished four things:

1.He
entered in to the exalted glory, to be “seated at the right hand of the Father”.
But His exaltation is also “our exaltation” (Collect for the Vigil Mass)

2.By
ascending He could now send down upon us the promised Gift of the Holy
Spirit.

3.Having
ascended He now acts as our Intercessor before the Eternal Father. We pray in
our liturgy that Jesus, God’s “Only Begotten Son, our High Priest, is seated
ever-living at [God’s] right hand to intercede for us” (Prayer over the Offerings
at the Vigil Mass) and that He is “Mediator between God and man” (Preface I).

4.Finally,
He goes before us in order to prepare a place for us. As the Collect for
today’s mass proclaims, His Ascension “is not to distance Himself from our
lowly state but, that we, His members, might be confident of following where
He, our Head and Founder, has gone before.” (Collect for the Mass During the
Day, Preface 1).

The Bodily
ascension of Our Lord demands a rethinking of how we view our human bodies. The
Lord’s body was as real as yours and mine. It was real when He was a baby lying
in a manger; and when His sweaty arm reached for a tool in the carpenter’s shed;
and when He collapsed into a deep sleep on a boat in a storm. His body was real
when He endured the hours of torture during His passion, when He took His last
breath on the cross and it was real when He rose from the dead. At first, His
disciples thought He was a ghost and that Jesus had been resurrected in
spiritual form, but in the sharing of meals and the touching of wounds, His
disciples came to know that their Lord had risen in all His humanity – body and
all. And finally, it was in this same physical body of human flesh and blood,
that Jesus ascended into heaven. In the Ascension, His body was not left
behind. That God would embrace human flesh into the Godhead, shatters the
perception of the Divine as distant and removed from our lives here on earth.
God is intricately involved with creation. The creature now incorporated into
the Creator.

The Word became
flesh,
yes, but also the flesh became Word. This also tells us a lot about ourselves
as human beings. We are accepted and embraced not in spite of our humanity but
within our humanity. Our bodies are not a “necessary evil” but the handiwork of
the One who accepts them even in their imperfection. Let’s stop hiding and
pretending, but rather, let us come to God in all of our humanity with the
comfort of knowing that God, the Second person of the Trinity has holes in His
hands, and is now bodily present in Heaven; the first born of all creation,
pointing to the glorious, exalted future that belongs to us all.

Yes, the Word
became flesh. Indeed! It is astounding that on that first Christmas Jesus
came to earth and took on human flesh. It is just as astounding that at His
Ascension, He kept it! In doing so, the Son of God tells us that He cares, not
just for our souls, but for our bodies as well. He has redeemed both. He will
save both on the Last Day.

Therefore, there
is absolutely nothing belittling or flawed in existing as flesh and blood. The
only problem with our existence is that human flesh has been riddled with sin
since the Fall. But God took on flesh so that He could undo the damage sin has
done to flesh. In the resurrection, He will give us a body such as the one He
now enjoys. He will create a new heaven and a new earth—a new physical
world.And once again, His dwelling will
be among us. Until that time, we demonstrate our love for the Lord by caring
for people’s souls and for their bodies too. For Christ loves both. Until that
time, we have the Eucharist, the body and blood, soul and divinity of Our Lord
Jesus Christ to “kindle in our hearts a longing for the heavenly homeland and
cause us to press forward, following in the Saviour’s footsteps, to the place
where He entered before us” (Prayer after Communion at the Vigil Mass).

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About Me

A priest of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Parish Priest of Church of Jesus Caritas, Kepong and Administrator of Chapel of Kristus Aman, Taman Tun Dr Ismail, KL.
Ecclesiastical Assistant and Chaplain for the Catholic Lawyers Society